Let’s start out by talking about the original web social space: Friendster. In the Summer of 2003, it was the site to be at, and arguably its success heralded the coming “Web2.0 Revolution”.

See, Friendster, for you young ‘uns, was the Grandmother of the social media space. She was the original friend network site, but unfortunately, she was also very cranky about how people used her “resources”. The NYTimes had a great article on what went wrong; but as a synopsis, it was a matter of forgetting whom made the site important in the first place: the users. Instead of letting them “get on with it”, the creative things people tried to use Friendster for were squelched; add to it the sites well-known stability issues and Friendster lost mindshare and its lead started to erode to nothing.

The site which took over the reigns was MySpace, a site which had no problem letting people “get on with it”. It has had great success based on this; but obviously, the many ways in which their corporate parent has tried to monetize its success means they now have their own troubles in this department. Advertising revenue has become the main sore-point, it seems; and the result has been endless wrangles with their “partners”.

Now Facebook has been quietly building up a second-place position by being initially focused solely on college, and then high school, students. Being captain of that space has now given it the quiet luxury of fomenting a broader strategy. One which is quite clearly intelligent, based on the failure of Friendster, and the current (self-imposed) travails of MySpace: Facebook Platform.

When I first heard about this, I was not impressed because I heard about it from the developer side. Talking about an “open API” is great but doesn’t say much about what can be done. Well, I quickly got to eat my words. This looks to be a Whopper.

Already people have developed apps to allow integration of Twitter; your Netflix queue; random RSS feeds; your Amazon wishlist (a little buggy at the moment)… and I will venture to guess that these will keep on coming. And coming, and coming.

What makes it so nice, though? What makes me stand up and take notice, when surely it’s not that much different than all the customizations available for a MySpace page? In alliterative language: click, configure, consume. Facebook follows the best of Web2.0 interface standards to avoid the messy coding and kludges that MySpace requires for its customization. It’s seamless and simple, and I am sorely impressed.

In conclusion: Friendster failed cos it failed to be open. MySpace succeeded cos they didn’t do anything about people’s ad hoc customizations. But MySpace is caught in a technological cul-de-sac: cos they never guided any of the customization craze, any attempts to move its people over will risk destabilizing its lead. So what else then?

Now, Facebook just needs critical mass, cos they have what looks to be the most elegant solution to the desires of “UserSpace” to do what they will with their profiles. They have plenty of younger users, but will definitely be in need of coaxing in the older ones (and non-academic ones, for that matter).

If I could be Facebook’s evangelist right now, I know I’d be shouting it from the hilltops: Facebook makes it simple. They’ve done a great job at broadening their appeal without either a) wrecking their technological base or b) forcing their users to become programmers just to make things work. Brilliant.